The faint whirring of a wall fan in the background, accompanied by the even fainter whirring of the hard disk of her Macbook, which was accompanied by the furious typing of inspired fingers on its keyboard, were the only sounds heard in the room.

Music, perhaps, it should have been called, given that it was highly probable she would not be hearing this same sound for the next four years.

The computer clock at the corner of her screen moved on, unaware - or maybe even indifferent - to the fact that every time it moved, it was that much closer to tearing her away from all she knew and all she held dear.

“That’s why the Internet was invented”, a calming inner voice assured her, “Think of it as a long, long vacation”. Yet she could not, would not, be soothed, and as she typed her eyes shined with a longing for just another quiet moment in the place she was in, and she had to hold back a strange sensation in her throat that threatened to stop her from breathing.

Once upon a time, when she was very young, because of some injustice she suffered or other, she wanted badly to run away from home. "She's just a baby" and "Oh come on, he doesn't know any better" were horrible excuses for her siblings' unacceptable behaviour. She wanted, needed, to run away, just to show them that she didn't have to put up with their rubbish.
She pulled out her Mickey Mouse backpack, and thought up a pack-list of all that she would bring, telling herself that she would only bring the most precious of her possessions with her. She listed her nicest dress, two tins of Milo, a bottle of Ribena cordial, a few changes of underwear, her dolls, her Teletubbies and Postman Pat VCDs, the list went on and on, until she eventually realised it was impossible for her to run away, because she prized too much in her home to let any of it go.

Back in the present, she did her best not to remember how she was once upon a time, when she so desired to leave, and to compare it with how she was now, when she was so reluctant to do so. It worked...for the time being.

She averted her vision from the clothes strewn around her, some still bearing their cardboard labels and plastic label fasteners, others haphazardly thrown around for lack of proper folding. That could always be done later. As long as she got it done in the next eight days, everything would be fine, she figured. The later she put it off to, the better she would feel, so she thought.

She wondered, for a moment, what would happen to the box of books under her sister’s bed. They had been entrusted to her, and she asked herself, for a brief moment, who would come and take over her duties of protecting the books, and of taking them out when the time came for them to leave their box.
And after a while, she reached an epiphany. She was somewhat like those books, and all she was doing was waiting to be removed from her box and sent to a faraway place. This drove her into a brief depression, and she thought about her mother, her father, her idiot of a brother, her sister, and all her friends whom she'd be leaving behind.

Even so, she had to move on, she told herself. She had to remember Grizzabella’s words, to think of a new life, and not to give in. And no matter how hard it would be, the day would come, sooner or later, when she would have to be taken out of the box for good, never to return, and she would need to prepare herself for that day, somehow.

Though, she whispered slightly to herself, she would only pack her clothes later.